Your networking system and making it work for your business

I am running a two-hour workshop on advanced networking skills for Brighton and Hove Chamber of Commerce on Thursday (April 30).

If you are in the city and can come along, I would heartily recommend it. It's only £35 (£45 for non-members), so you can't go wrong.

Here are the highlights:

1 Think of networking as a system, not an activity. The workshop is about how to get your networking systems to work for you.

2 Get out there and meet people. It doesn't work if you don't show up.

3 Meeting people is only the first step. Below are the other steps.

4 Follow-up. Send the people you meet an email to say hello and a LinkedIn invitation. Always - unless they were really awful.

5 Almost every one you meet networking will be useful to you in some way. Often the people you meet who are not going to be clients (which is most of them) are the most useful.

They are the ones who will know your potential clients, or have an interesting story you can tell your potential clients, or will have something you can buy from them.

So dismiss no-one, unless their values are so far from yours that you never want to see them again.

6 Get people to engage with you. You might have something in your 'hello' email which invites them to sign up to your email newsletter, book to buy something from you, or download a free trial. You might ask them a question so they have to reply back to you.

7 Follow up again. Follow them on Twitter and respond to something they said. Or email them when that event comes up again and ask them if they are going this time. Or send them something useful, funny, or relevant to them.

8 Follow up over and over again. That's why it's a networking system.

9 If you're just starting out, and don't have a lot of contacts yet, do this manually and put lots of love and care into it. If you've already got more than a few hundred contacts, you need to automate this.

Julia Chanteray runs the Joy of Business and has helped hundreds of companies in Brighton to grow. She has grown her own business through a mixture of networking and online marketing. To book a place at the workshop on April 30, visit: www.businessinbrighton.org.uk